It doesn't actually matter in this case who is right—as I said, they're wrong about the medicine—what matters is who understands the human beings who vote better. And Trump understood these people better than any member of the establishment in either party, which is why he was able to hijack one and defeat the other.
Inventing stories about how half the country just wants the other half to hurt won't help win the midterms and the next presidency. We have to get past that and actually look at what Trump voters truly believe, then speak to them as real people, not strawmen.
Being a leader means understanding the reality of a situation, developing a strategy, and understanding where people are so you can get them on board and all work together to improve things.
It does not mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power for yourself while making their situation even worse.
It does mean “understanding people” so you can pander to their misunderstandings and prejudices, and take all the power to do whatever you wanted to do. Their prejudices are the real part of reality.
Politicians who forget this fact get owned.
Frankly, everyone has prejudices, some stronger than others, but the Dems made it part of their ethos that if you even acknowledge having some of these prejudices that you're a bigot. But their fatal flaw is the Dems convinced themselves that very few people harbor these beliefs.
Very real strategic case in point: I think it sucks that this is our current reality, but the American populace at large has now shown multiple times that they are not willing to elect a woman from the managerial class as President. It's not just Dems (e.g. Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris) but Republican women have also been rejected multiple times (e.g. Nikki Haley, Carly Fiorina). I am not in any way saying being female is the only reason these candidates were rejected (indeed, I think one flaw on the Democratic side is that they pushed this "they just hate women" narrative too strongly), but in a ~50/50 electorate, a few percentage points makes all the difference.
So the problem for the Dems is they want to appeal to this "higher nature", but, again, as much as I may personally not like to believe this, I strongly think that if they put forth another woman at the top of the ticket in the near future that they will lose, again.
So if you want to be a leader, you have to start by understanding people and, yes, pandering to them. There's a reason why too many of our powerful politicians have been essentially indistinguishable from sociopaths.
Is that a position you hold consistently? Is there anything you believe that you wouldn’t be swayed on when presented evidence to the contrary of your belief?
I ask, because there is an awful lot of mainstream Republican and (here’s the controversial bit) Democrat thought that simply has no basis in reality.
Training for what? What if our population of working age people is far larger than our economy's ability to absorb whatever sort of service worker you imagine they should be training to become? Given a fixed total population, there's only room for x masseuses or y graphic artists. If we have n unemployed people needing training, and that number is higher than x and y combined (for any sort of x and y), telling them to retrain doesn't solve their problem. Some are going to lose out. The truth of the matter is that by offshoring manufacturing, we created an economy where there is a surplus of ultimately unemployable people.
A message of training isn't just bullshit, it's transparent bullshit. Most people have an intuition that this is the case, after all. As for midterms, both the Republican and Democratic parties have a different strategy. They will simply import voters who will vote for them. H1Bs for the GOP, and the remainder of the naturalization pipeline for the Ds. It's slow, but they're willing to put in the longterm effort.
The Musk supporters feel that universal automation is coming fast and I bet the Chinese being as industrious as they are will seize upon that to make up for their demographic issues. They are already he world leaders at renewables and nuclear and regardless, their ability to ramp up carbon based fuel sources is second to none.
Meanwhile the US appears to have an okay demographic pyramid(especially compared to their peers) but birth rates are declining and all the ingredients to increasing birthrate are not in the upswing (good incomes, cheap real estate, stable governance). Now you are killing off the US's golden goose (immigration) it seems like you are repeating the mistakes of China.
Hillary famously said "those jobs aren't coming back". I do not know if she was incorrect in that, but I suspect she might have been right. I don't see a viable path to that happening, and I've yet to hear anyone else describe such.
The tough nut to crack is that it is impossible to talk with red tribe voters about any of this! You can sit there and listen, of course. But as soon as you say anything that still addresses their frustration and pain, but yet diverges from their overly-simplistic party chorus, you're now part of the "other" that is eagerly responsible for their problems and will just be reflexively argued with.
And the situation has gotten so bad that lighter touch individual-freedom-respecting solutions (that they could possibly agree with in theory) aren't likely to even work now. For example twenty years ago, stopping the profligate government spending and handouts to banks could have stopped rural economies from continuing to get hollowed out. Allowing deflation in consumer goods would have allowed main street to experience some of the gains from offshoring. Re-setting the definition of full time employment to 40 hours per household per week would have slowed down the financial grindstone.
Instead these days we're basically down to direct government stimulus to create new jobs - directly at odds with the medicine they think they need. Or even worse, completely uninspiring answers like UBI.
